DiverSea News - 2025 Annual Meeting
INSPIRATION AND COLLABORATION AT THE 2025 DIVERSEA ANNUAL MEETING
The 2025 DiverSea Annual Meeting took place on 7-9 October in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Now on our third annual meeting, we have seen clearly how valuable it is to come together in person to advance our shared work and build up our collaborations.
To save our limited time together for in-depth, interactive workshops, we kicked off the in-person Annual Meeting with three digital pre-meeting sessions for a round of structured updates and discussions from each work package leader. This set a great tone for the in-person meeting and let us jump straight in when we arrived in Mallorca.
We were also very glad to welcome representatives of our #MODAlliance sister projects to the pre-meeting, with inspiring presentations from Sanjina Upadhyay Stæhrare of OBAMA-NEXT and Nicolas Pade of MARCO BOLO.
Fresh off the digital pre-meeting sessions, the in-person meeting in Mallorca was packed with a busy schedule of discussions and interactive workshops. The first workshop on knowledge management, led by GATE's Vassil Vassilev, set the stage for thinking deeply about linkages across DiverSea's work packages, which span a pipeline from data collection to application. Parallel sessions then let us dive deeper into DiverSea case study areas, including the Adriatic and Dardanelles regions, along with specific methods and project objectives. Sedef Korkmaz of the Mediterranean Conservation Society co-led a hands-on communications workshop along with Tereza Fonseca of LPN, NTNU's Glenn Dunshea and Bob O'Hara led a session on the state of the art in eDNA analysis, the possibilities of AI for phytoplankton image analysis were explored by SynPlan's Hai Nguyen, and Alice Guittard of AUEB, together with Ward Standaert and Jean-Luc De Kok of VITO, guided us through worked examples of systems dynamic modeling and causal loop diagrams.
Further sessions covered Essential Ocean Variables (from NTNU's Murat Van Ardelan), integrated modeling of seagrass distribution (from NTNU's Bob O'Hara), science-industry knowledge transfer (from AUEB's Alice Guittard), and data management, and we heard scientific presentations representing a wide range of DiverSea's focal research areas. With such a dense and productive schedule, it's safe to say the whole DiverSea team left the meeting with a lot of momentum to move forward with our collaborative work.
We are grateful to Asociación Tursiops, especially Marga Cerda, for hosting the Annual Meeting. We look forward to building on this momentum with plenty of collaborative work to come.
